


He Who Strives On

by Emelye



Category: Frankenstein - Nick Dear
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-10
Updated: 2013-11-10
Packaged: 2018-01-01 00:39:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1038287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emelye/pseuds/Emelye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He who strives on and lives to strive<br/>Can earn redemption still."<br/>― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Second Part</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Who Strives On

“One mind is enough for a thousand hands.”  
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: First Part

If all things were as they should be, then _he_ should not be, but as they were not what they _should_ be, so many more things could come into _their_ being. 

How he learned. How he _learned_ , there, on the tundra, the deep, snowy wastes at the foot of his master. His creator. _I can teach you_ , he said. And he taught him. He reflected back genius to the man of science until he had taught him to love. And then, when he was dead, when the words and the wine had run out and their time, so very little time, as well, he took the journal, and the coat and the boots and the pack and he traveled South once again. 

If things had unfolded as they should, the journal would have been burned and Elizabeth would have remained in her hole in the ground. But the love of a father is a desperate thing. A woman respects creation, feels pain in the creating, and a mother’s love lives half between this world and the next. A father will keep a journal and attempt to resurrect a beloved niece himself with all the men of science to be had for a discrete coin. They failed, of course.

She was still perfect.

The house at the foot of the mountain was purchased, the money stolen, though no soul was harmed in the taking. 

He did not clothe her in velvet and pearls, for all things, he realized, must be born as they are. When the hour came, and she emerged from the womb of his construction, he caught her in his arms, and bore her up before leaving her to learn the use of legs and arms and body. She was beautiful. She was _his_ , and to her he would be all things. 

He did clothe her, then, and taught her all he knew, though she cared nothing for Milton. 

“I am not Eve, I can not bear you a child,” she told him. “I wish for a child,” she told him. 

“I can not give you a child,” he told her. “Other women are made for children. I made you for me. We are different.”

“Why would you do this?” She asked.

The creature could not look at her. “Because I was alone, and now I am not.”

She took his hand firmly within her own, their sutures on their palms entwined with their fingers. “And neither shall I be,” she said. 

He returned Milton to the trunk and drew a new volume from within. 

“Let us try Goethe,” he said.

_You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never_  
 _Rises from the soul, and sways_  
 _The heart of every single hearer,_  
 _With deepest power, in simple ways._  
 _You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,_  
 _Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,_  
 _Blowing on a miserable fire,_  
 _Made from your heap of dying ash._  
 _Let apes and children praise your art,_  
 _If their admiration’s to your taste,_  
 _But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,_  
 _Unless it rises up from your heart’s space._  
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: First Part 


End file.
